Bringing Collaborations to Chemistry

I am a scientific leader with over 20 years of dense experience in drug discovery at big pharma, start-up companies and rare disease foundations. I have considerable informatics, ADME-Tox and drug discovery expertise, with particular focus in computational and in vitro tools to accelerate research, increase screening efficiency and decrease compound attrition due to predictable liabilities. My research interests include neglected and rare disease drug discovery as well as repurposing approved drugs. I also conduct research on how new computational technologies can be used for scientific research. My collaborative research has enabled >15 successful NIH and EU grant applications since 2005 and I have partnered with collaborators on many more funded grants as a consultant.

Leadership Achievements

Collaboration and external influencing par excellence with industry, academia, non-profit labs and foundations. I am on advisory boards for companies, academia, 3 rare disease foundations and software companies as well as adjunct professor at 3 US universities.

Prolific science communicator with >270 papers and book chapters (most of which have been very well cited, Google Scholar h-index = 60, (Aug 2016), Web of Science h-index = 47 (July 2016)) and given over 200 invited talks at conferences, companies and universities globally. Editor or co-editor of 4 books and Editor of a Pharmaceutical Technology book series for Wiley. Scientific blogger and communicator (Collaborative Chemistry, collabchem.com; Twitter, Collabchem).

Commercial orientation: Vast experience from pharma and biotech collaborations at identifying and obtaining opportunities for funding and applying leading edge biological, chemistry and computational technologies. Multiple patents and applications on methods, systems and compounds.

Results orientation: An intellectual and scientific risk taker who delivers beyond expectations. Specific focus on applying computational and cheminformatics methods with data in the public domain in order to improve drug discovery research

Strategic orientation: Possesses a broad perspective of drug discovery and development having contributed to early drug discovery through to post marketing studies.

Flexible: Able to move into new areas and rapidly contribute e.g. neglected disease and analysis of tuberculosis and malaria screening data; helping green chemistry to use mobile applications – Green Solvents, a free Android and iOS app. More recently I have assisted three rare disease foundations, connected with their scientists and contributed to scientific efforts and publications.

Obtaining funding: PI on NIH grants and contributor to collaborative European FP7 and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grants. Contributor to many other grants as a consultant. Experienced grant writer and ad hoc reviewer (US and International).

Education

D.Sc.

Science

Thesis title: Computational and in vitro models for predicting drug interactions in humans

University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland

2004-2005

Graduated

5th July 2005

Ph.D.

Medicine and Therapeutics

(Clinical Pharmacology)

Thesis title: Maintenance and cryopreservation of xenobiotic metabolism in precision-cut liver slices. Evaluation of an alternative in vitro model to isolated hepatocytes

University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland

1992-1995

Graduated

16th October 1996

M.Sc.

Clinical Pharmacology

Thesis title: Speculations on the relative roles of cytochrome P450 and flavin containing monooxygenase in the metabolism of S12363

– Principal Investigator responsible for directing development of a Systems-ADME-Tox software product MetaDrug by a multinational team of > 20 scientists (mostly in Moscow), funded by SBIR. The product was launched in 7 months and had 6 Pharma sales by April 2006 (and won “Best in Show new product” at the 2007 CHI Molecular Medicine Marketplace Meeting).

– Responsible for the development of new software technologies.

– Responsible for writing SBIR grants.

– Responsible for presentations to customers in the industry as well as publications for scientific and marketing purposes.

Students (co-) supervised: Richard Snyder, Butler University, IN (MS, pharmacy project, 2001); Cheng Chang, Ohio State University & The University of Maryland (PhD, 2005; postdoc 2006) now a senior scientist at Pfizer, Akash Khandelwal (postdoc) now at the University of Arizona and Praveen Bahadduri (PhD, 2007) now a senior scientist at Genzyme.

PhD committee external member for Praveen Bahadduri, Swan Zheng and Lei Diao (The University of Maryland).

International application number No: PCT/US2006/010053: Ekins S, Bugrim A, Nikolskaya T, Nikolsky Y, System and method for prediction of drug metabolism, toxicity, mode of action, and side effects of novel small molecule compounds.

Ekins S, Hohman M and Bunin BA, Pioneering Use of the Cloud for the Development of the Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) database., In Ekins S, Hupcey MAZ and Williams AJ, Collaborative Computational Technologies for Biomedical Research, Series Editor Ekins S. John Wiley and Sons, July 2011. pp335-361.

Ekins S and Giroux C, Computers and systems biology for Pharmaceutical Research and Development, in Ekins S, Computer Applications in Pharmaceutical Research and Development, Series Editor Wang B, John Wiley and Sons, Hoboken, NJ. p139-165, 2006.